Amazon announced today the release of a new EC2 instance type targeted at high I/O dependant applications. We’ve run benchmarks on a lot of the Amazon plans in the past & found them to be rather lacklustre in terms of performance.

The server seems to struggle in UnixBench with the low buffer size file copy tests, but excels in the Shell Script tests. The CPU is a Intel Xeon E5620 which is disappointing, it seems like it could be really holding this particular instance back when you consider some of the higher end CPU’s (E5 Series) benchmark up to 400x better.

Price

Running this instance is by no means cheap, at $3.10/hour it’ll set you back almost $2,400 per month. However for high IO intensive applications that are currently using a large amount of EC2 instances it may be worthwhile downscaling to a smaller number of the hi1.4xlarge instances. You can see some interesting calculations from Netflix earlier today on their savings by moving to the high i/o instances.